Tag: population

The “stabilization wedge” idea is a modular way of reducing carbon emissions.

The world is now home to 7 billion people, each of whom contributes to the carbon emissions that are slowly cooking the globe. To find out how growing population affects our plans to deal with climate change, we talked with Princeton’s Robert Socolow, co-creator of one of the best models for thinking about how to prevent climate change.

Many of my students are “green” consumers. They are proud of riding bicycles, they turn off lights when they leave the room, and they eat little or no meat. But they are usually surprised when I tell them that the most important decision they will make, as far as its impact on natural resources is concerned, is how many children to have.

Most sources of carbon emissions—heating and lighting homes and stores, making steel, providing food—grow in proportion to population. We’ve just hit 7 billion people, and there’s no way any single approach, or just two or three approaches, can effectively deal with the environmental pressures that this many people exert.

To foster a way of thinking about the problem of climate change that involves using many different approaches in tandem, Steve Pacala and I introduced the “stabilization wedge” in 2004. A wedge is a campaign or strategy that reduces carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere over the next 50 years by a specific amount, relative to some baseline future where nothing is done to slow down climate change. Examples of wedge strategies are driving more efficient cars, driving cars less far because cities are laid out differently, building lots of wind power, and growing many more trees.